LGPL

LGPL

Posted Nov 17, 2005 19:09 UTC (Thu) by tcabot (subscriber, #6656)
In reply to: LGPL by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Sony's rootkit: an update

There are two ways to look at this. The first way says "it's never been proven in court", and takes this to mean that the license is somehow weaker as a result. The second way (as explained by Eben Moglen at the FSF annual associate member meeting) is "everyone that's considered challenging it in court has backed down before it got that far" and takes this to mean that the license is so strong that there's no point in challenging it in court.

Remember that the GPL *grants* you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law. So let's imagine that you go to court and have the GPL declared legally invalid. Congratulations, you've just sawed off the branch that you were sitting on because then you would have *no* right to distribute GPL'ed code.

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